The Collected Works of Theodore Parker

Front matter

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Preface by the Editor

The progress of religious belief, from a less to a more enlightened stage, is carried on apparently by a series of waves of thought, which sweep over the minds of men at distant intervals. There are periods of comparative calm and stagnation, and then times of gradual swelling and upheaving of the deep, till some great billow slowly rears its crest above the surface higher and still higher to the last; when, with a mighty convulsion, amid foam and spray, and “noise of many waters,” it topples over and bursts in thunder up the beach, bearing the flood-line higher than it had ever reached before. A great national reformation has been accomplished.

In the eyes of those who have watched intelligently the signs of the times, it seems that some such wave as this is even now gathering beneath us, a broader and a deeper wave than yet has ever arisen. No partial and temporary rippling of the surface is it now, but the whole mass of living thought seems slowly and steadily upheaved, and the ocean is moved to its depths. Such a phenomenon, if true, bears the highest promise ever held out to humanity, and we cannot but hail it with faith and joy, conscious that the sudden uprising of even the purest reforming sect, carrying us forward for the moment with earthquake violence, would afford no such reason for hopeful confidence in the future.

But this universal upheaving of thought, along with its vast promise of good, brings with it also forebodings of changes which it is impossible to contemplate without grave anxiety. When this wave breaks, if break it will, it will reach a point which has never been disturbed hitherto, and in whose conservation or engulfment some of the most sacred interests of the human race are concerned. The old temple of Traditional Religion, the religion which rests primarily on external evidence of certain supernatural events, stands front to front with the advancing waters, and needs must bear the whole force of their incalculable weight. Already the venerable fane in which our fathers worshipped so long, seems menaced with destruction, while one after another its bulwarks and corner-stones are sapped and submerged, and the sands on which it is built are shifting on every side. In the judgment of many its doom seems inevitable, unless not merely some partial lull and subsidence of the waves takes place, but the whole tide of human thought for ages turns back and sets in an opposite direction.

These solemn forebodings are not unnaturally scorned by those whose trust in the old creed has remained hitherto undisturbed. Every man's peculiar Church must needs be to his mind “founded on a rock,” and impregnable to “the gates of hell.” But to others equally naturally the creed they have themselves found untenable seems sure to prove in the end untenable to all who bring to its examination equal freedom and earnestness, and they note how as years go on every advance in philosophy and every discovery in science seems to bear in one and the same direction. Looking back over a few decades, the change in the state of all controversies on religion becomes remarkable, and the wild raids of professed “infidels” and timid attacks of latitudinarians in past times were found to be superseded by an orderly and resolute invasion, all the more formidable that the hostile bands approach from the most opposite quarters. It seems to be but a question of time, when the leaguer will be complete, and after outposts and trenches have fallen one by one into the hands of the enemy, the old towers themselves will fall, undermined by a deeper philosophy than their builders knew, and shattered by shot and shell from every cohort in the camp of knowledge. Underground, there works the ever-progressing conviction that a supernatural revelation, miracles, prophecies, infallible books, and infallible churches, are things in themselves nearly, if not utterly, incredible. And overhead there hurtle in the air (so fast that we can scarce note them as they pass) the missiles from every battalion of science, striking deadly blows wherever they can be brought to bear on the defences of the supposed revelation. The astronomy, the geology, the chronology, and ethnology of our time have at least seemed always to contradict, and never to corroborate, the Book which is yet claimed to come directly from the Great Author of Nature; and instead of external authentications and internal verifications of its various parts, every critical explorer brings us back new specimens of anachronisms, contradictions, and difficulties without number, till the authorship and date of all the more important histories are involved in hopeless obscurity. Everywhere and on all sides the results of inquiry are the same, or if now and then the besieged regain with much shouting some vantage ground too lightly claimed by the enemy, they are soon driven back from whole lines of trenches in another direction. Though books appear every month to assure us that “Scripture and science” are “not at variance,” and that the “Testimony of the Rocks” is in favour of the Mosaic Cosmogony; yet the urgency with which the asseveration is reiterated and the wildness of the hypotheses to which their authors have recourse to reconcile what ought to require no reconciliation, leave us an impression the direct contrary to that which they intend. Why are there, we ask, no volumes pouring from the press, corresponding to the rapid stream of advancing knowledge, and calling on us to observe “triumphant verifications of Scripture from the recent discoveries” in this, that, or the other science? It is certainly not for lack of will that no such books are written, or written only to bring corroboration to histories no more doubted than that of Thucydides.

The truth is, after all, simple enough. Those grand and noble books which make up the Bible and constitute the “Great Sheaf” in the whole harvest of human thought, even those books cannot be weighed in the balance, or measured by the standard of God's omniscience. Call them human and fallible, and they seem almost divine. But call them divine and infallible, and seek to find in them that knowledge of nature which, when they were written, only Nature's God possessed, and we do them wrong and despite, and obscure all their rightful claims to admiration. Nay, to try them as even historically accurate, according to our philosophy of history, is an injustice and anachronism. It is an anachronism to expect that men, who in the very extreme of their piety and reverence attributed every remarkable occurrence, every thunder-storm, or victory, or cure of disease, or wise legislation, or composition of noble poetry, to direct Divine interposition—men to whom secondary causes were nothing and first causes everything, should, in the capacity of historians, supply us with statements of facts unrefracted by the coloured media of their imaginations; and detail for our cautious scepticism evidences which they never dreamed of requiring for their own simple-minded and ever ready belief. And passing beyond the Bible to the creeds of the churches, we find it equally impracticable to fit the thoughts of one age into the faith of another. The theological scheme which men composed when they believed the earth to be a plane, the centre of the universe, finds no place for itself in our modern cosmology, and the tremendous drama supposed to have been acted on that mighty stage, before the appalled and gazing Hosts of Heaven, becomes inconceivable played upon our little planet, one of the smallest of the many worlds revolving round one of the millions of suns of the unknown myriads of starry clusters. Modern Astronomy has not so much contradicted isolated statements in the Hebrew Scriptures as left the whole Nicene Theology without standing-room.

In every direction it would seem as if the battle of Traditionalism were lost, nor will the one great compromise offered by its noblest defenders suffice to save it. It will not be enough to abandon the infallibility of sacred books, and claim only Divine Inspiration and perfection for the moral and spiritual part of Christianity. Divinely true, divinely perfect as is much of that moral and spiritual part; there also the human and the fallible are to be found, and weightier than the blows which are struck at either the philosophy or the science of the Bible are those directed against doctrines offensive to the conscience and paralyzing to the heart. Nor are these morally objectionable doctrines only matters of unimportance and detail, such as Old Testament stories and precepts of earlier ages, corrected afterwards by a purer teaching. The deepest denial of all rises from the heart of humanity against fundamental dogmas, whose elimination from Christianity would almost identify it with Theism—the dogmas of the Fall, the Atonement, a Personal Devil, and an Eternal Hell.

So wide and vast is this upheaving wave of thought of which we have spoken, that other traditional creeds beside Christianity seem simultaneously threatened by its advance. Mahometanism is visibly running out the last sands of its existence; Judaism itself is undergoing a change; and the vast faith of India, whose origin is lost in the night of time, will probably before another century is over have fallen to rise no more. Not from external causes are these and the other religions of the East perishing away. The outward energies at work against them, the European missions and efforts at proselytism, are almost ludicrously inefficient to move a feather of their gigantic weight. But from within the change everywhere appears; the old life is gone, a new one is gradually arising, and that not by the formation of purer sects, but by the gradual enlightenment of the masses. Now, this vast movement throughout the world may possibly be of a more transitory nature than it now appears. The wave by which we are ourselves upborne is hardly in our power to measure aright, and it may be within the compass of events that it may subside ere long, leaving things everywhere nearly as they have been in the centuries gone by. In particular, as regards Christianity and the English branch thereof, it may be that all that is true in modern criticism and philosophy may be capable of adaptation, in ways we see not now, to its fundamental ideas; and the Church, by enlarging its formularies, may be found capable of absorbing them all, and arising with renewed life like a giant refreshed. These things may be so, we say, but it must be admitted that it is hard for us to see how any such reconciliation can take place. The tendency observable is all the other way. At the very utmost, so vast a modification of the popular creed must in such case ensue, as to render it hardly recognizable by its present adherents, while the interval of transition must be one of danger and difficulty, almost equal to that of the entire destruction of the old and reconstruction of a new belief. To enable men to pass through such transition with safety, an independent standing ground for faith in God and duty would be as needful as in the case of the most complete cataclysm and reformation.

But if the contrary prove true, if (as to all human prevision seems most probable) it be found impossible to achieve any compromise between the old and the new, then it is clear that a catastrophe of vast importance is inevitably approaching. The Churches of Christendom, and above all the Protestant Churches, have hitherto stood upon the honest belief of intelligent men, Whatever hypocrisy or pious frauds may at any time have been used for their support, we are persuaded they have hurt rather than helped them. But if the time ever come when this state of things can go on no longer, when there must be a defect either in the honesty or the intelligence of the adherents of the Churches, then a fatal change will pass over them. The tree whose root is dead, or whose stem is hollow, may continue to put forth leaves for a few years, but it must wither at last. The symptoms of such approaching decay in the Christian Churches will doubtless follow in natural sequence; and the refusal of the higher class of minds to adopt the ministry as a profession will be succeeded rapidly by the further and further depreciation of the mental status of the Church, and by a growing public sense of its hollowness and incapacity to meet the problems of the age. When this deteriorating process has reached a certain length, all the public and private interests involved in the Churches' conservation, all the vast vis inertia of such an institution, so long solidly established on English soil, and rooted alike in English prejudices and English sacred affections—all these securities, so often quoted as guaranteeing its immutable maintenance, must give way at last and fail. There is no durable foundation for a religion whatsoever, save the sincere belief of its adherents.

If these things be true of Traditional Christianity, then, as we have said, a solemn catastrophe is slowly, but surely, approaching. The great Ship which has been the Ark of humanity so long, and which even now unfurls its sails so proudly to the winds, that great and noble ship is, perhaps, in our own time settling slowly down and sinking under the waters of an unfathomable sea. A mournful and a terrible sight it would be, were we not assured that all the souls it bears are for ever safe, and that all its freight of precious truths will float up again with unerring safety, even from the forgotten depths of time.

The task of him who would most essentially benefit his race in a time like this, must be to prepare men to meet unharmed the inevitable future. He must supply them with a faith which will remain undisturbed when the great change arrives.

The perils of finding ourselves standing alone without a God to love or a law to obey, while the frail structure of the creed of our youth fell around us, like a tent on Lebanon, before the blast of the storm—these perils may be known to many of us, and happy are they who have survived them in full spiritual and moral life. Happy are they who slowly and painfully have built up stone by stone for themselves from the foundation a shelter for their souls; who have begun perchance with naught, save the resolution

“I will be just and wise and mild, Since in me lies such power,”

and then have found that in the hard struggles of the higher self after victory over temptation, they have become conscious that there was One present at the fight—One who could aid them with Almighty help, “strengthening them with might by His Spirit in the inner man”—One who when the battle was done would take His soldier to an eternal home. Happy are they who have learned such things; but they know best through what dangers they have passed, and to which they were consigned by the teachers who bade them hold by a creed full of contradictions and difficulties, or else abandon all hope that God would hear their prayers. To them, above all, it will seem terrible that the masses of men, the uneducated, the over-tried sons of toil, should have to pass through such perils; not one by one as now, but, as it may soon be, by thousands and millions, enhancing all each others' difficulties, and liable to the most fearful aberrations. In view of such a cataclysm, many would fain, with cowardly hearts, strive to put off the evil day and keep away from men's minds all such questions. But it is not in their hands to do so. The tide cannot be stopped by any Canute's decree. It is the great divinely-ordered progress of thought which has brought us to this pass, and we may take courage from the knowledge that He who caused it will guide us through. We must not, dare not, doubt that it will be to a larger, higher, purer truth the human race is being led onward; and that that truth is safer even than all the well-tried errors of the past. The old Ragnarok, the “Twilight of the Gods,” in which our heathen forefathers believed, may be coming now; but there will be a glorious sunrise afterwards. The true “Ages of Faith” are not behind us, but before.

The task, then, as we have said, of the religious teacher of our time, is to prepare and strengthen men for the future; to give them such faith in God and reverence for His law, independently of traditional creeds, as shall avail when these creeds are overwhelmed. He must enable every man to say with the brave Bishop of Natal, “I should tremble at the results of my inquiries, were it not that I believe firmly in a God of righteousness and truth and love. Should all else give way beneath me, I feel that His everlasting arms are still under me. That truth I see with my spirit's eyes, once opened to the light of it, as plainly as I see the sun in the heavens; and that truth, more or less distinctly apprehended, has been the food of living men, the strength of brave souls that yearn for light, and battle for the right and true, the support of struggling and sorrow-stricken hearts, in all ages of the world, in all climes, under all religions.” The lesson for ever repeated by Christian teachers that, save within the shadow of their churches, no prayer can be offered with hope of acceptance on high—that false and fatal lesson must be disproved and for ever discarded. The very opposite teaching must be given,—that in the solemn search for truth, to which every strong soul must sooner or later betake itself, the help of God, regarded as simply the Lord of Truth, and not the Patron of this or that theological system, is the one thing needful for our success. When we most of all want God's spirit to guide us, and God's law to keep us in that path of duty wherein alone the mental eye is unclouded, we shall not then be left to lament that we have lost them hopelessly. We shall rather find, on the contrary, with relief indescribable, that the hands from which the fetters have fallen for ever are those which rise the most freely in supplication to heaven. Our teacher must do this for us, he must accomplish the task which Rénan lays down as the especial one of our age, “Transporter la religion par delà le surnaturel, séparer la cause à jamais triomphante de la religion, de la cause perdue du miracle.” In a word, the teacher whom we need must find for us the true foundation of faith, and must build thereon a fortress within, and behind the old tottering walls of tradition, so that whensoever these may crumble and fall the souls of men may dwell secure, viewing the ruin around them without dismay, while their faith in God and in His righteous law remains undisturbed for ever. Thus shall that teacher prove himself a Preserver and Renovator of Faith, a Builder, not a Destroyer. Incidentally, and to make his work secure, he must needs dig deep and clear away much rubbish; but he does it for the purpose of restoration. The destructives are his antagonists, who would fain leave humanity with no faith, save the one which all their efforts can never repair, and who for its maintenance would deprive us of that reliance on conscience and the religious sentiment whereon alone the ultimate ground of any faith, even of their own, is to be found.

While contemplating, however, the noble task which might belong to such a teacher as we have supposed, we are arrested by a singular difficulty which it is clear would meet him from the side of those who ought naturally to be his allies. The wide-spread upheaving of thought of which we have spoken has brought out, along with its great and deep benefits, a phase of feeling which may now be traced pervading the higher order of minds of all nominal sections of opinion, orthodox no less than heterodox. Beside the counter-revolution of those who hold tenaciously by the past in proportion as they perceive it to be slipping away from them; beside the far more deplorable error of those who in every religious reformation of the world make an advancing creed the pretext for a retrograde morality; beside all these, there exists a class of minds who have impatiently carried beyond the limits of reason the tendencies of the age, who have abandoned, not only a definite faith, but the hopes of finding any definite faith whatever. Very great and very true is the impression which has been felt in our day of the mystery which surrounds human life on all sides, of the fallibility of all human knowledge, and of the ineffable, impenetrable Majesty of that awful Being whose nature our forefathers presumed to parcel out and analyze as a chemist might do the water or the air. We no longer look on the different creeds of the world, as the martyrs did of old, as being absolutely true or absolutely false, the service of God himself or of the Devil himself. We perceive them to be only steps upward in an infinite ascent, only the substitution for a lower of a higher but still all imperfect ideal of the Holy One. Doubtless we are nearer to the true judgment now. Doubtless also it was well that of old, in the days of the stake and the rack, men should have seen these things differently, for few indeed could have borne to die clearly discerning their persecutors to be only partially mistaken in their own creed; the creed for which they were enduring torture and agony,—only one of the thousand “little systems” of earth

“Which have their day, and cease to be,”

a “broken light” from the inaccessible Sun of Truth. If a few sublime Socratic souls might have been found contented thus to bear all things sooner than renounce that one ray of purer light which had been granted to them, yet never could ordinary men and timid women, the rank and file of the army of martyrs, have fought the good fight under such banners. It was needful for them to discern in outward objective dogmas a distinction of good and evil, which in truth existed subjectively in the fidelity or unfaithfulness of their own souls to such light as they possessed. For them our modern breadth of thought would have seemed culpable latitudinarianism, and our habit of pouring the new wine of our own ideas into the old bottles of sacred formulæ a mockery and a snare. Ignatius and Polycarp, Latimer and Hooper, would have bitterly despised the alchemy which can “distil Astral Spirits out of dead churches,” and find something in Paganism and something in Popery transmutable at will into Christianity and Protestantism. But we in our day have reached a different pass. We seem to have quitted the region of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, and to have come to a land

“Where it is always afternoon.”

There is among the highest order of minds a disposition to accept finally a condition which may be designated as one of reverential scepticism. They doubt not only whether any true religious creed has yet been found, but whether a mind penetrated with due modesty should seek to find one. While the age vaunts itself of being peculiarly one of religious earnestness, it has thus come to pass that it is peculiarly one of religious despair. We have ceased to think that a great intellect can possess a great faith.

A sort of direful fashion has set in to praise whatever seems vaguest in doctrine and weakest in faith, as if therefore it were necessarily wisest and most philosophic. We look distrustfully on any one who has not dissolved away in some mental crucible all solid belief in a Personal God, and a conscious immortality into certain fluid and gaseous ideas of Eternities and Immensities. We assume it contentedly as proven that the “limitations of religious thought” make it as hopeless for us to find a faith which will keep alive our souls as an elixir vitæ to keep alive our bodies. We wander to and fro hopelessly through the wilderness of doubt, and if any come to tell us of a land flowing with milk and honey, the glory of all lands, which they have found beyond, we dismiss them with a complacent sigh, even if they bring back from their Canaan the noblest fruits.

There is surely great error in this state of feeling. Though infallible knowledge is not for man, though we have neither faculties to receive it nor language to convey it, yet it is far indeed from established, that our powers fall short of attaining such a share of knowledge of Divine things as may suffice for the primary wants of our souls. We need such knowledge for the higher part of our nature, as much as we need bread and clothing for the lower. It is the greatest want of the greatest creature, and if it indeed have no supply, then is the analogy of the universe broken off. There is a presumption of incalculable force, that these cravings which arise in the profoundest depths of our souls, which we can never put away, and on which all our moral health depends, are not to be for ever denied their natural satisfaction, while the ravens are fed and the grass of the field drinks in the dew. We have, indeed, asked hitherto for too much. We have called for whole systems of theology, dissecting with blasphemous audacity the mysteries of our awful Maker's nature and attributes. We have cried like children for the moon of an unattainable infallibility. But because these things are denied us, are we therefore to despair of knowing those fundamental truths which we must either gain or else morally and spiritually die? It would be to assume the main point in question, to argue that a Father in Heaven must needs make Himself and His righteous law known to His children. But it is a simple induction from the order of the universe, to conclude that the soul of man is not the only thing left without its food, its light, its guide, its sole-sufficing end and aim.

If, then, it be not improbable that a religion is to be found supplying us with such knowledge, but on the contrary, a thing to be predicted from man's nature and the order of the world; then, he who comes forward to tell us he has found this needful knowledge is not to be hastily dismissed as a dreamer. His special faith may be true or false, but some such faith as his is what we have to look for with well-grounded hope of success.

It is in this light, then, as a teacher of those cardinal truths of religion which are needful for our souls' higher life—those truths which we have reason to trust are within our powers to know,—as a builder up of faith—that faith which will remain unshaken upon the rock of human nature itself, when time shall have levelled every edifice built on the shifting sands of tradition; it is thus that Theodore Parker claims to be heard.

A few brief words concerning his doctrines and his life may, perhaps, be useful, by enabling the reader hitherto unacquainted with his writings to apprehend their bearing more perfectly. These writings, however, are so clear and honest, and that noble life was so simple in its absolute devotion to its holy purpose, that small space will suffice to speak for both.

There are four bases logically possible for a religion,—a living inspired Head, an infallible Church, an authoritative Book, an individual Consciousness. Of these four, Parker chose the last, leaving such creeds as Mormonism and Lamaism on the first, Romanism on the second, Calvinism on the third, and scores of intermediate churches shifting illogically between all four. The reasons for his rejection of the first three bases of religion are set forth at length in his writings, as also for his reliance on the veracity of Consciousness, corroborated for the individual by the consciousness of the wise and good of all ages.

Standing on this ground of Consciousness, he preached the great doctrine of Theism, the Absolute Goodness of God. Every man is conscious of revering and loving certain moral characteristics, and of hating and despising certain others. Here, then, we find the assurance that He who made us to feel such reverence on one side and such contempt on the other, is Himself all that He has caused us to revere and love, and never has been or can be aught that by the constitution of our nature we hate or despise. The difference between the characters ascribed to God by traditional creeds and by Theism lies in this, that the traditional creeds, though attributing every epithet of honour to Him, yet in effect neutralize them all by delineations of His dealings with mankind wholly at variance with the natural sense of such epithets, insomuch that the words “Good” and “Merciful,” when applied to God, have often come to bear as conventional a sense as the titles of honour appropriated to the petty royalties of earth. Theism, on the contrary, confessedly rests its conception of the Divine character on such consciousness as He has Himself given us of what is Good and Just. This consciousness is as yet all imperfect and incomplete. God must be more good than our conception of goodness, as the heavens are higher than the earth. But so far as it goes, our consciousness is true, and negatively it must be absolutely true. God's character—could all its awful splendours be revealed to us, God's dealings with His creatures—could all their scope and purport from eternity to eternity be unveiled before our eyes, might never bear one blot or contain one act which in our heart of hearts we could regard as cruel or unjust,—nay, that we could fail to adore as infinitely good and merciful.